The Race (43 page)

This is my way out. I found out I don't belong here. I don't know where I belong
—_nowhere, I guess. I'm disgusted at myself, and too confused to go on. I just can't live like this_.

I love you. You've always been a good big brother to me. It's not your fault I could never be like you
.

At the bottom, in handwriting so shaky that the name was barely legible, his brother had scrawled
Clay
.

When Corey looked up, Cantrell's face was drawn. "Where did you get this?" Corey asked.

Cantrell held his gaze. "He left it in his bag."

"You're 'Jay,'" Corey said slowly. "The cadet he wrote me about."

"His roommate," Cantrell corrected. "The cadet who chose to live."

The last phrase, Corey perceived, explained much about who Cantrell had become. With unspoken dread, Corey held up the letter and asked, "How did it even come to this?"

"From my first day at the Academy," Cantrell answered in a bitter tone, "this senior made me his special project."

"Cagle," Corey said.

For an instant, Cantrell looked startled; then he slowly nodded. "Once you show weakness, some people enjoy finding out how much you can take. But Cagle was different.

"Most seniors have gotten over the fun of hazing—even the sadists who like singling out the weakest link. But Cagle had 'gaydar.' He hated me for being what he knew I was, and Clay for sticking by me." Briefly, Cantrell touched his eyes. "I warned Clay to keep his distance, not to befriend me. He wouldn't listen. Maybe he knew I didn't want him to.

"We became Cagle's only targets. He'd come to our room at three A.M., wake us up for inspection. One night he tore our room up, supposedly searching for alcohol, and then kept us awake to clean up after him. At mealtime he made us stand at attention, answering question after question so we didn't have time to eat. He forced us to clean the latrines with toothbrushes, scrubbing on our hands and knees while he stood over us screaming that we'd missed a spot. Day after day, our only question was
what
he'd do to torture us, not whether." Cantrell stared at the carpet. "It was sick, and I think most people sensed it. It was like Cagle put all his fear and hatred into forcing us to leave. But none of his classmates wanted to be a rat. So it just went on and on and on."

Corey shook his head. "Then why on earth did you let him catch you having sex?"

"I didn't know," Cantrell answered miserably. "I mean, I knew about myself. But not Clay.

"That night Cagle woke us up after midnight, once again peppering us with questions and complaints until we were exhausted. I was ready to break. When he finally left, I started crying." Cantrell paused, then continued in a monotone: "Clay put his arms around me. He was afraid, too, he said—afraid of failing, of what his parents would say, of letting you down. 'If it weren't for Corey,' he told me, 'I wouldn't be here. I'm only here because he helped me.'"

"So he knew?" Corey said quietly.

Cantrell did not seem to hear. "Pressed against him, I felt myself get aroused, and then I realized he felt it, too. 'It's all right,' he told me. 'It's all right.'" Cantrell's eyes shut. "For that one moment, Clay made it all right.

"I forgot about everything but that. And then Cagle threw the door open and caught us in the beam of his flashlight. It was as though he knew that it would happen," Cantrell finished softly. "They called Clay's death a suicide. I still think of it as murder."

"Murder?" Corey said with equal quiet. "If so, there's blame to go around."

Cantrell still stared at the carpet. "Cagle shouldn't be an air force officer," he said.

"He's not. He hasn't been for thirteen years." When Cantrell looked up at him, Corey said, "Once I became a senator, I got a seat on the Armed Services Committee. I took an interest in Cagle's career. So did a powerful friend of mine. Cagle found it convenient to leave."

Cantrell's face registered surprise, then satisfaction. "Good."

"Maybe for the air force," Corey answered. "I found it did very little good for me. The person I was angriest at wasn't so easy to get rid of."

Cantrell studied him in silence. They were no longer senator and supplicant, Corey felt, but two strangers uncomfortably bound by guilt and sorrow, and its claim on their very different lives. "Would you have accepted him, Senator?"

"When he was alive? I guess so. I certainly accepted him once he was safely in death's closet."

The comment, no less corrosive for Corey's flatness of tone, caused Cantrell to stare at the letter. "What will you do with this?" he asked.

Corey thought first of his brother and then, unavoidably, of Rob Marotta, Bob Christy, Charles Blair, and, last of all, his parents. "Other than wish you'd never given it to me?" he answered. "At this particular moment, I honestly don't know."

"HOW WAS MR. RAINBOW?" Spencer asked Corey.

Corey sat at the table in Spencer's suite, the manila envelope so damning to Blair between them. "Let's talk about Blair."

"Let's talk about the nomination. As I see it, your choices come down to this: out Blair or accept Christy's demands about gays—or both. Unless you want to take this to Blair and warn him to withdraw."

"I can't do that," Corey said flatly. "It'll look like
we're
the ones who had him followed. I've got no debt to Blair that justifies that risk."

Spencer paused, looking at Corey more closely. "Are you okay?"

"I'm just tired. So let's get this done. I can't see outing Blair ourselves—as you point out, we don't know where this came from. I don't want our fingerprints on it."

"I've thought about that. Why not give it to Mr. Rainbow? He'll know what to do, and he's got to be sick of closeted gays who play the homo-phobe card."

"No," Corey said softly.

Spencer eyed him across the table, as though waiting for an explanation. "Think about it," Spencer urged. "Now or later, Blair's toast. Why give this switch-hitting Judas a temporary reprieve at the risk of making Rob Marotta—a morally challenged opportunist who trashed both you and Lexie—president of the United States?

"Sometimes the things we don't want to do are necessary. Do you want to be president or a fucking plaster saint?"

Corey thought of the letter in his pocket. "I'm not going to play someone else's game, Hollis. Give Gilligan back his file, with instructions to tell whoever sent him we're not interested."

"So you're not doing
anything,
" Spencer burst out in frustration.

Corey felt a genuine sympathy: Spencer did not know, and Corey would not tell him, the reasons he was acting as he must. "Oh, I'm doing something. If you're right, someone whose motives are obscure is desperate to take down Blair—now, not later.

"If we don't bite, they'll do something else. The balloting starts in about twenty-eight hours; by that time, we'll know what it is."

"By that time," Spencer responded, "Christy may have put Marotta over the top. What do you mean to do for
him
?"

"Nothing," Corey said. "Except to tell him that myself."

COREY AND CHRISTY sat facing each other, three feet apart. "This
is
a surprise," Christy told him. "Is there reason to hope you've seen the light?"

"This is about something else, Bob." Corey took the letter from his coat pocket. "I want you to read this."

Christy looked at Corey more closely. Raising his eyebrows, he fished the reading glasses out of his shirt. "What is it?"

"My brother's suicide note."

Christy's expression froze, as though perceiving something in Corey that was alien and new. With obvious reluctance, he began to read. In the time it took for him to finish, Christy's features sagged. For the first time, he looked old.

"That day in the park," Corey told him, "my brother was there, too."

Christy shook his head, the movement slow and heavy. "How you must hate me," he said after a time. "And how you must have hated pretending otherwise."

"I did hate you," Corey said simply. "But not as much as I despised myself. He was my brother, and I missed the most important thing about him. If I hadn't, nothing you said or did would have wound up in a suicide note."

Gingerly, as though passing a fragile china cup, Christy put the letter back in Corey's hands. "What do you want from me, Corey?"

"Nothing."

Christy shook his head, his expression bleak. "No, you want something. Unless this moment is pleasure enough."

Corey shrugged. "It'll have to do. I'm not going to use this against you. There won't be a bathetic press conference where I exploit my brother's death to 'humanize' my position on gay rights. I don't even expect you to soften; the respect I've conceived for you stems from the fact that you believe in what you say." Corey paused, his voice quiet but firm. "All you need to know is that I can't go with you on this—now, or ever. If there
is
a God, which I sincerely wonder about, I think He judges both of us more harshly than He judges Clay. Or maybe we just judge ourselves. Whatever the case, for me to scapegoat people like my brother because of your beliefs would only make things worse."

Christy gazed at him without speaking, as though the finality of Corey's words made any response superfluous. "So do whatever you need to do," Corey told him, and let himself out.

BY FIVE O'CLOCK, TWO HOURS BEFORE THE TUESDAY NIGHT SESSION was to open, Corey and Senator Drew Tully were plotting how to crack Blair's hold on the Illinois delegation.

His broad face resembling slabs of granite, Tully took a swift gulp of Scotch. "With Riggs and Statler I could have done it. But now they're supposedly so sick from 'food poisoning' that they've scurried home, replaced by a couple of Blair's toadies.

"No question that Blair has leapfrogged me in clout—I may be on the Appropriations Committee, but now my delegation is imagining
him
as president, for chrissakes. The idea of Blair making life-and-death decisions makes me want to puke—if I could break that twit, I would. He's just so fucking 'perfect.'"

"Keep trying," Corey urged. "And if you think I can make a difference by talking to a delegate, just call." He placed a hand on Tully's shoulder. "This much I'm sure of, Drew—I'm a hell of a lot more likely to be president than Charles Blair ever will be."

Looking doubtful, Tully nodded, then tossed back his remaining Scotch.

THE NEXT TWO hours passed in skirmishes. At the risk of becoming a party pariah, an aging delegate from Missouri—pledged to Marotta but not bound by state law—announced that she would vote for Corey because of his stand on stem-cell research. "My husband has Alzheimer's," she said at a press conference. "God doesn't mean real people to suffer for the sake of a speck in a petri dish." But a few minutes later, one of Corey's delegate hunters, desperately seeking votes, was booed at a meeting of the Idaho delegation. Then Rohr News reported rumors that Bob Christy would pledge his delegates to Marotta.

About Blair, Spencer reported to Corey, he heard no rumors at all.

And so the delegate hunters, in Spencer's account, were hunkered down in trench warfare, inveigling undecided delegates who wanted favors both trivial and profound: Super Bowl tickets, dinner with Lexie, a joint appearance with Corey on
Larry King Live,
a round of golf with a former president too old to walk. Then there was Harold Simpson, the pompous and venal congressman from Oklahoma, who, though leaning toward Marotta, proposed to barter his vote for a vacancy on the Supreme Court.

"Try the court of appeals," Corey instructed Spencer. "No way I could put him on the big Court."

A few minutes later, Spencer called back. "Simpson's not biting," he told Corey. "He insists on calling you directly."

His temper fraying, Corey glanced at his watch. "Does he now," Corey said. "Then I hope he enjoys our talk."

When Corey's cell phone rang, Simpson said bluntly, "You need me, and so does the Supreme Court. I can bring a lot of real-world experience."

"I'm sure you can," Corey said. "So let's review what the real world looks like.

"In the real world, you've got cash and favors from military contractors spilling out of your pockets. If I decide to make a lousy nomination, I'll at least want it to stick. Yours won't—the Democrats would sink you like a bagful of dead cats.

"If Marotta told you anything different, he's lying. But he hasn't—or else you wouldn't be coming to me. So take the court of appeals or the hell with you."

"Are you trying to piss me off?" the congressman said loudly.

"I don't care enough to try. If I become president, you won't have to like
me
. But I damn well better like
you
." Corey lowered his voice. "Don't waste my time with hurt feelings, Harold. Just give Hollis your answer."

Hanging up, Corey realized there was sweat on his forehead.

He inhaled, still for a moment, the nearest thing to meditation he could manage.

The convention had started. On CNN, a convention film on volunteerism—entitled
People Who Care
and featuring Mary Rose Marotta reading to preschoolers—was followed by Mary Rose's well-timed nightly entrance.
This is a parody,
Corey thought to himself.
It simply can't be real
. Then the orchestrated chants began: "Mary Rose, Mary Rose, Mary Rose ..."

Outside the convention, demonstrators had gathered to protest the war and the power of the Christian Right, while at the podium Senator Lynn Whiteside, one of Corey's supporters, tried to pick her way through the minefield of stem-cell research. "Though we may disagree about issues," she ventured gamely, "we are united in our love of God."

On the convention floor, the members of several delegations—some pledged to Christy, others to Marotta—stood up, turning their backs on her. One, an elderly man in a red hat that sported an elephant trunk, fell to his knees to pray, tears streaming down his cheeks.

Corey took out his cell phone and called the head of his Secret Service detail. "I need some fresh air," he said.

DRESSED IN JEANS and a polo shirt and shepherded by Secret Service agents wearing casual clothes, Corey edged into the crowd of demonstrators pressing against the barricades surrounding Madison Square Garden.